The Back Porch: Detroit Rises from the Ashes

On the flight home from ACI’s 2014 National Home Performance Conference, I read Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy. It’s a gritty, sad story about the decline of one the greatest U.S. industrial cities. It was fitting that ACI’s conference was held in Detroit–thanks to the growth of the auto and wartime industries in the early 20th century, Detroit was the birthplace of the U.S. middle class. But according to LeDuff, Detroit, which “once led the nation in homeownership, is now a foreclosure capital.”